Yanchao Bi, Pengfei Chen, Yulong Yan, Qian Zhang, Biao Wang, Leida Li
With the popularization of livestreaming applications, automatic camera tuning has become indispensable for ordinary users to enjoy high Quality of Experience (QoE). However, the existing Image Quality Assessment (IQA) methods face two challenges in camera tuning. First, they struggle to identify subtle quality difference between images, which is common in camera tuning. Second, the ability to explain fine-grained differences and to provide suggestions for camera tuning are even more lacking. To address these challenges, we first construct FGLive-Comments, an instruction tuning dataset with rich annotations of both preferences for fine-grained image pairs and quality reasoning from global and local visual evidence, which supports selective adjustment recommendations of camera parameters. Based on FGLive-Comments, we develop Q-CamTuning, a multimodal large language model for livestreaming camera tuning. Its progressive perception-evidence-guidance framework learns quality-aware visual representations, enhances fine-grained reasoning with global-local evidence, and maps quality issues to camera-parameter adjustment directions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Q-CamTuning outperforms existing IQA models in both quality scoring and fine-grained image pair ranking. User study also validates its ability to recommend camera tuning suggestions.
Xiangfei Sheng, Xiaofeng Pan, Leida Li, Qian Zhang, Biao Wang, Johan Wagemans, Weisi Lin
Aesthetic image cropping (AIC) aims to improve image composition and aesthetic quality by removing extraneous or distracting content. Over the past decade, AIC methods have evolved from specialized vision models to multimodal large language models(MLLMs). Reliable evaluation that reflects human preferences is essential for benchmarking AIC methods and guiding model optimization. However, the current AIC evaluation relies largely on geometry-based metrics such as intersection over union (IoU), as well as image aesthetic assessment(IAA) models. Although inconsistencies with human preferences have long been observed, the robustness and reliability of these evaluation criteria remain underexplored. To bridge this gap, we first construct CropBench, a large-scale benchmark comprising 106,995 human preference pairs for 1,019 images, with each candidate set containing the original image and candidate crops produced by 14 AIC methods. A systematic study on CropBench reveals that the existing criteria, ranging from IoU to off-the-shelf IAA assessment models, only exhibit limited alignment with human preferences. Building upon CropBench, we further propose CropReward, an MLLM-based reward model that evaluates a candidate crop by comparing with the original uncropped image and outputs a score indicating explicit aesthetic improvement or degradation relative to the original. In addition, we employ CropReward to construct CropReward-300k, the largest AIC dataset to date, and further develop CropAlign, a preference-aligned AIC model trained solely with CropReward supervision, without human-annotated crop boxes. Experimental results demonstrate that CropReward aligns with human preferences significantly better than AIC existing criteria. CropAlign also surpasses the state-of-the-art AIC methods, demonstrating the advantage of CropReward in guiding AIC model optimization.
Yihan Zang, Da Li, Shinkyu Park, Ivan Viola, Dominik Engel
Existing referring segmentation methods on Gaussian scenes primarily target whole objects, relying on segmenter-generated candidates from which a vision-language model (VLM) selects. Such predetermined fixed candidates may omit fine-grained parts needed as targets or cues for identifying objects. We introduce SplatScout, a query-driven, closed-loop approach that places perception under VLM control. The model actively selects views, directs segmentation, and inspects rendered 3D results to refine its predictions. For part-level evaluation, we introduce PartRef-ScanNet++, comprising 261 manually verified queries across 12 ScanNet++ scenes with mesh-derived ground truth. On PartRef-ScanNet++, SplatScout achieves 0.538 mIoU, substantially outperforming existing methods. Ablations demonstrate the benefits of iterative refinement, while comparisons across VLM backbones highlight the importance of effective tool-feedback utilization. SplatScout also achieves higher scores on four existing referring benchmarks. Code and the PartRef-ScanNet++ benchmark are available at https://github.com/kaust-violab/SplatScout.
Da Li, Yihan Zang, Ivan Viola, Zeyu Wang, Dominik Engel
Achieving high-quality reconstruction and responsive camera tracking remains challenging for monocular RGB Gaussian splatting SLAM under a limited optimization budget. We present an online system that addresses this challenge by combining learned geometric priors with explicit geometric camera tracking, which can substantially outperform learned camera prediction in terms of tracking accuracy. A frozen streaming 3D foundation model serves as a virtual RGB-D sensor, providing depth estimation from monocular video. An explicit geometric solver then estimates camera motion through feature reprojection, and a streaming Gaussian mapper integrates the resulting observations into a dense scene representation. We further show that geometric tracking improves camera pose accuracy across representative streaming geometry backbones, demonstrating the broader applicability of our approach. Extensive experiments on indoor and outdoor datasets show that our method significantly improves reconstruction quality over existing approaches, achieving about 7 FPS on a single RTX 4090 and delivering 2-3 times the throughput of the evaluated prior SLAM systems.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models combine multimodal perception with robotic control, demonstrating remarkable potential for generalizable manipulation. Yet, enhancing their execution typically relies on auxiliary sensory inputs (e.g., depth, 3D point clouds) or costly fine-tuning. Inspired by the insight that Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) act as key-value memory, we propose Action-Entropy-Weighted and Attention-Guided Retrieval of Observation Evidence (AWARE), an effective, training-free, and plug-and-play module for VLAs. Specifically, AWARE tracks layer-wise uncertainty via an element-wise Action Entropy metric, and retrieves observation evidence into the element's FFN through associative memory lookup. Crucially, the retrieved features are weighted by instruction-guided cross-modal attention to isolate task-relevant observation cues, while injection strength is adaptively scaled by the element's entropy and relative network depth. This selectively channels observation evidence to high-entropy action dimensions and deep layers where grounding decays, while leaving converged representations intact. Across LIBERO, SIMPLER, CALVIN, and real-world robot manipulation, AWARE consistently improves diverse VLA architectures with minimal computational overhead, achieving the largest gains on long-horizon tasks without architectural changes or additional training. Project page: https://jiabingyang01.github.io/AWARE/.
Da Li, Yuxiao Luo, Keping Bi Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jiafeng Guo Institute of Computing Technolgy, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wei Yuan Kuaishou- 快手科技, Biao Yang, Yan Wang, Fan Yang Kuaishou- 快手科技 等 10 位作者
Multimodal Large Language Models advance multimodal representation learning by acquiring transferable semantic embeddings, thereby substantially enhancing performance across a range of vision-language tasks, including cross-modal retrieval, clustering, and classification. An effective embedding is expected to comprehensively preserve the semantic content of the input while simultaneously emphasizing features that are discriminative for downstream tasks. Recent approaches demonstrate that MLLMs can be adapted into competitive embedding models via large-scale contrastive learning, enabling the simultaneous optimization of two complementary objectives. We argue that the two aforementioned objectives can be decoupled: a comprehensive understanding of the input enables the embedding model to achieve superior performance on downstream tasks via contrastive learning. In this paper, we propose CoMa, a compressed pre-training phase, which serves as a warm-up stage for contrastive learning. Experiments demonstrate that with only a small amount of pre-training data, we can transform an MLLM into a competitive embedding model. CoMa achieves new state-of-the-art results among MLLMs of comparable size on the MMEB, realizing optimization in both efficiency and effectiveness. Our project is available at https://github.com/Trustworthy-Information-Access/CoMa.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表